Arthur Hayes is betting high on Hyperliquid, arguing in a new essay that HYPE could rise to $150 by August 2026 even if the broader crypto backdrop remains weak. His case rests on a well-known exchange-token playbook, but updated for a market where decentralized perpetrators, not centralized locations, are increasingly controlling the most valuable trading stream.
Why Hayes thinks hyperliquid could reach $150
Hayes frames Hyperliquidity is the key asset in a sluggish or sideways market because exchanges can continue to generate fees regardless of whether prices rise. According to him, that is even more important for Hyperliquid because 97% of the protocol revenue is used to buy back HYPE from the market. “Hyperliquid, the dominant offender DEX, is the largest revenue-generating project that is not a stablecoin,” he wrote. “No other project in the entire crypto world returns as much money to token holders as Hyperliquid.”
His target roughly implies a 5x move from around $30 at the time of writing. To achieve that, Hayes said Hyperliquid would need to increase its 30-day annualized revenue to $1.4 billion, a level he said the platform previously reached in August last year. His model also assumes that the market will revalue the token from around 12 times earnings to roughly 25.2 times, still below or close to the range he cites for major traditional exchange names.
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A big part of the argument is that Hyperliquid doesn’t need an overall expansion of its crypto derivatives business to grow. It just needs to keep taking shares from centralized exchanges. Hayes said a 3.97 percentage point increase in market share would be enough for Hyperliquid to return to annual sales of $1.4 billion.
The engine for that next stage, he says, is HIP-3, Hyperliquid’s permissionless perpetuals listing framework. Users who stake 500,000 HYPE can launch markets using the platform’s matching and margin engine, and Hayes points to early traction in silver, gold, the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500. “In just four months, HIP-3 volumes have accounted for nearly 10% of total Hyperliquid revenue,” he wrote. “Permissionless listings have always been the holy grail of DEXs, and the rapid growth in trading volumes proves that this is how Hyperliquid will stand out from the rest.”
Therefore, his model assumes HIP-3 revenues increase 160% in six months. He also flags HIP-4, which he says should allow permissionless prediction markets, as a possible upside kicker not included in the base case.
Competition is the main objection that Hayes tries to neutralize. He argues that total volumes of offenders’ DEXs can be distorted by wash trading, points farming, and other incentives, making raw volume a poor measure of actual usage.
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His preferred metric is ADV-to-OI, or average daily volume to open interest, because open interest requires real capital to be posted. Based on that, he says Hyperliquid has the most “real” volume among the top five offender DEXs. He also says that snapshots of the order book for Bitcoin offenders showed that Hyperliquid was usually the cheapest place to execute the size once slippage occurred.
Hayes also spent time overhanging the token supply, another issue that had him tactically bearish late last year. He notes that the team distributed almost 20% of the awarded tokens in November and December, but only about 1% in January and February. “With that out of the way, the team drastically reduced distributions to help recover HYPE,” he wrote, while acknowledging that this part is speculative.
Even his stress case remains constructive. Hayes says that if the market only pays a 12x earnings multiple and the team receives 9.91 million HYPE per month, but revenue still recovers to $1.4 billion annually, the token would still be worth about $58, or about 75% above current levels.
At the time of writing, HYPE was trading at $33,237.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com